Qing Zeng, PhD

Dr. Zeng received her Bachelors in Engineering from Beijing Polytechnic University, a Masters in Computer Science from the University of Hawaii, and Masters and PhD degrees in Medical Informatics from Columbia. She joined the Decision Systems Group at Brigham and Womens Hospital as a research scientist with an Instructor appointment at Harvard, and rose through the ranks at Harvard to Associate Professor. In 2009 she was recruited to the University of Utah were she was at the time of election an Associate Professor of Biomedical Informatics. Dr. Zengís has made significant and unique contributions to the field of informatics, especially in the areas of consumer health informatics research and natural language processing software development. She has applied novel computational approaches to the improvement of health communication (such as using context to predict term difficulty and automatically enhancing patient-specific instructions with pictures). Dr. Zeng led the development of the Open-Access and Collaborative (OAC) vocabulary, which is one of the first consumer-oriented vocabulary sources in the Unified Medical Language System. Along with colleagues, Dr. Zeng developed an open-source and modularized natural language processing system: the Health Information Text Extraction (HITEx) System. HITEx is a suite of open-source natural language processing (NLP) tools, which are written in Java and build on the General Architecture for Text Engineering (GATE) framework. The HITEx system is being further developed at the Veteran Affairs Hospital under the name V3NLP. These academic achievements are recognized by her election to the College.